Enhancing Glucose Level Prediction of ICU Patients through Irregular Time-Series Analysis and Integrated Representation

Accurately predicting blood glucose (BG) levels of ICU patients is critical, as both hypoglycemia (BG < 70 mg/dL) and hyperglycemia (BG > 180 mg/dL) are associated with increased morbidity and mortality. We develop the Multi-source Irregular Time-Series Transformer (MITST), a novel machine learning-based model to forecast the next BG level, classifying it into hypoglycemia, hyperglycemia, or euglycemia (70-180 mg/dL). The irregularity and complexity of Electronic Health Record (EHR) data, spanning multiple heterogeneous clinical sources like lab results, medications, and vital signs, pose significant challenges for prediction tasks. MITST addresses these using hierarchical Transformer architectures, which include a feature-level, a timestamp-level, and a source-level Transformer. This design captures fine-grained temporal dynamics and allows learning-based data integration instead of traditional predefined aggregation. In a large-scale evaluation using the eICU database (200,859 ICU stays across 208 hospitals), MITST achieves an average improvement of 1.7% (p < 0.001) in AUROC and 1.8% (p < 0.001) in AUPRC over a state-of-the-art baseline. For hypoglycemia, MITST achieves an AUROC of 0.915 and an AUPRC of 0.247, both significantly higher than the baseline's AUROC of 0.862 and AUPRC of 0.208 (p < 0.001). The flexible architecture of MITST allows seamless integration of new data sources without retraining the entire model, enhancing its adaptability in clinical decision support. Although this study focuses on predicting BG levels, MITST can easily be extended to other critical event prediction tasks in ICU settings, offering a robust solution for analyzing complex, multi-source, irregular time-series data.

LLM+KG@VLDB'24 Workshop Summary

The unification of large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs (KGs) has emerged as a hot topic. At the LLM+KG'24 workshop, held in conjunction with VLDB 2024 in Guangzhou, China, one of the key themes explored was important data management challenges and opportunities due to the effective interaction between LLMs and KGs. This report outlines the major directions and approaches presented by various speakers during the LLM+KG'24 workshop.

Generating Robust Counterfactual Witnesses for Graph Neural Networks

This paper introduces a new class of explanation structures, called robust counterfactual witnesses (RCWs), to provide robust, both counterfactual and factual explanations for graph neural networks. Given a graph neural network M, a robust counterfactual witness refers to the fraction of a graph G that are counterfactual and factual explanation of the results of M over G, but also remains so for any "disturbed" G by flipping up to k of its node pairs. We establish the hardness results, from tractable results to co-NP-hardness, for verifying and generating robust counterfactual witnesses. We study such structures for GNN-based node classification, and present efficient algorithms to verify and generate RCWs. We also provide a parallel algorithm to verify and generate RCWs for large graphs with scalability guarantees. We experimentally verify our explanation generation process for benchmark datasets, and showcase their applications.

Machine Learning for Blockchain Data Analysis: Progress and Opportunities

Blockchain technology has rapidly emerged to mainstream attention, while its publicly accessible, heterogeneous, massive-volume, and temporal data are reminiscent of the complex dynamics encountered during the last decade of big data. Unlike any prior data source, blockchain datasets encompass multiple layers of interactions across real-world entities, e.g., human users, autonomous programs, and smart contracts. Furthermore, blockchain's integration with cryptocurrencies has introduced financial aspects of unprecedented scale and complexity such as decentralized finance, stablecoins, non-fungible tokens, and central bank digital currencies. These unique characteristics present both opportunities and challenges for machine learning on blockchain data. On one hand, we examine the state-of-the-art solutions, applications, and future directions associated with leveraging machine learning for blockchain data analysis critical for the improvement of blockchain technology such as e-crime detection and trends prediction. On the other hand, we shed light on the pivotal role of blockchain by providing vast datasets and tools that can catalyze the growth of the evolving machine learning ecosystem. This paper serves as a comprehensive resource for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, offering a roadmap for navigating this dynamic and transformative field.

View-based Explanations for Graph Neural Networks

Generating explanations for graph neural networks (GNNs) has been studied to understand their behavior in analytical tasks such as graph classification. Existing approaches aim to understand the overall results of GNNs rather than providing explanations for specific class labels of interest, and may return explanation structures that are hard to access, nor directly queryable.We propose GVEX, a novel paradigm that generates Graph Views for EXplanation. (1) We design a two-tier explanation structure called explanation views. An explanation view consists of a set of graph patterns and a set of induced explanation subgraphs. Given a database G of multiple graphs and a specific class label l assigned by a GNN-based classifier M, it concisely describes the fraction of G that best explains why l is assigned by M. (2) We propose quality measures and formulate an optimization problem to compute optimal explanation views for GNN explanation. We show that the problem is $\Sigma^2_P$-hard. (3) We present two algorithms. The first one follows an explain-and-summarize strategy that first generates high-quality explanation subgraphs which best explain GNNs in terms of feature influence maximization, and then performs a summarization step to generate patterns. We show that this strategy provides an approximation ratio of 1/2. Our second algorithm performs a single-pass to an input node stream in batches to incrementally maintain explanation views, having an anytime quality guarantee of 1/4 approximation. Using real-world benchmark data, we experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of GVEX. Through case studies, we showcase the practical applications of GVEX.

Knowledge Graphs Querying

Knowledge graphs (KGs) such as DBpedia, Freebase, YAGO, Wikidata, and NELL were constructed to store large-scale, real-world facts as (subject, predicate, object) triples -- that can also be modeled as a graph, where a node (a subject or an object) represents an entity with attributes, and a directed edge (a predicate) is a relationship between two entities. Querying KGs is critical in web search, question answering (QA), semantic search, personal assistants, fact checking, and recommendation. While significant progress has been made on KG construction and curation, thanks to deep learning recently we have seen a surge of research on KG querying and QA. The objectives of our survey are two-fold. First, research on KG querying has been conducted by several communities, such as databases, data mining, semantic web, machine learning, information retrieval, and natural language processing (NLP), with different focus and terminologies; and also in diverse topics ranging from graph databases, query languages, join algorithms, graph patterns matching, to more sophisticated KG embedding and natural language questions (NLQs). We aim at uniting different interdisciplinary topics and concepts that have been developed for KG querying. Second, many recent advances on KG and query embedding, multimodal KG, and KG-QA come from deep learning, IR, NLP, and computer vision domains. We identify important challenges of KG querying that received less attention by graph databases, and by the DB community in general, e.g., incomplete KG, semantic matching, multimodal data, and NLQs. We conclude by discussing interesting opportunities for the data management community, for instance, KG as a unified data model and vector-based query processing.

Distributed Graph Embedding with Information-Oriented Random Walks

Graph embedding maps graph nodes to low-dimensional vectors, and is widely adopted in machine learning tasks. The increasing availability of billion-edge graphs underscores the importance of learning efficient and effective embeddings on large graphs, such as link prediction on Twitter with over one billion edges. Most existing graph embedding methods fall short of reaching high data scalability. In this paper, we present a general-purpose, distributed, information-centric random walk-based graph embedding framework, DistGER, which can scale to embed billion-edge graphs. DistGER incrementally computes information-centric random walks. It further leverages a multi-proximity-aware, streaming, parallel graph partitioning strategy, simultaneously achieving high local partition quality and excellent workload balancing across machines. DistGER also improves the distributed Skip-Gram learning model to generate node embeddings by optimizing the access locality, CPU throughput, and synchronization efficiency. Experiments on real-world graphs demonstrate that compared to state-of-the-art distributed graph embedding frameworks, including KnightKing, DistDGL, and Pytorch-BigGraph, DistGER exhibits 2.33x-129x acceleration, 45% reduction in cross-machines communication, and > 10% effectiveness improvement in downstream tasks.

Core-based Trend Detection in Blockchain Networks

Blockchains are now significantly easing trade finance, with billions of dollars worth of assets being transacted daily. However, analyzing these networks remains challenging due to the large size and complexity of the data. We introduce a scalable approach called "InnerCore" for identifying key actors in blockchain-based networks and providing a sentiment indicator for the networks using data depth-based core decomposition and centered-motif discovery. InnerCore is a computationally efficient, unsupervised approach suitable for analyzing large temporal graphs. We demonstrate its effectiveness through case studies on the recent collapse of LunaTerra and the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) switch of Ethereum, using external ground truth collected by a leading blockchain analysis company. Our experiments show that InnerCore can match the qualified analysis accurately without human involvement, automating blockchain analysis and its trend detection in a scalable manner.

Efficiently Embedding Dynamic Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge graph (KG) embedding encodes the entities and relations from a KG into low-dimensional vector spaces to support various applications such as KG completion, question answering, and recommender systems. In real world, knowledge graphs (KGs) are dynamic and evolve over time with addition or deletion of triples. However, most existing models focus on embedding static KGs while neglecting dynamics. To adapt to the changes in a KG, these models need to be re-trained on the whole KG with a high time cost. In this paper, to tackle the aforementioned problem, we propose a new context-aware Dynamic Knowledge Graph Embedding (DKGE) method which supports the embedding learning in an online fashion. DKGE introduces two different representations (i.e., knowledge embedding and contextual element embedding) for each entity and each relation, in the joint modeling of entities and relations as well as their contexts, by employing two attentive graph convolutional networks, a gate strategy, and translation operations. This effectively helps limit the impacts of a KG update in certain regions, not in the entire graph, so that DKGE can rapidly acquire the updated KG embedding by a proposed online learning algorithm. Furthermore, DKGE can also learn KG embedding from scratch. Experiments on the tasks of link prediction and question answering in a dynamic environment demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of DKGE.